Well I am going to start posting again as I miss it. Let’s start with this absolutely flabbergasting look at published research. Dr. Malcolm Kendrick is one of my favorite blogs to visit. He isn’t a fan of most research…

There we are, nice and reassuring to know that peer-review is such a fabulous system. As for the quality of published research itself, here is one of my favourite quotes by Drummond Rennie, at the time the Deputy Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.:

‘There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature citation too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too selfserving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print.’

A view supported from a slightly different angle by Dr Marcia Agnell, who was the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine for two decades. This was, and remains, the single most powerful and influential medical journal in the world. At least it is, when it comes to citations and impact factor:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” Dr Marcia Agnell

Courtesy of Fat Head Tom Naughton’s blog comes this fantastic blog that will scare you down to your core. Dr. Malcolm Kendrick is a Scottish doctor and author of “The Great Cholesterol Con” and I cannot stop reading his blog. Karen and I have been becoming more skeptical of science with each passing month. Dr. Kendrick is miles ahead of us with evidence galore of how scared all of us should be when an “expert” stands up and tells us what to eat or what drugs to take. Basically all studies pointing to this or that drug should be ignored they are ALL probably based on massaged evidence. Neat. Anyway here is a snippet that while not written by Dr. Kendrick pretty much sums his blog up. Lots of links and great stuff there.

Anyone who has been a scientist for more than 20 years will realize that there has been a progressive decline in the honesty of communications between scientists, between scientists and their institutions, and between scientists and their institutions and the outside world.

Yet real science must be an arena where truth is the rule; or else the activity simply stops being science and becomes something else: Zombie science. Zombie science is a science that is dead, but is artificially kept moving by a continual infusion of funding. From a distance Zombie science look like the real thing, the surface features of a science are in place – white coats, laboratories, computer programming, PhDs, papers, conference, prizes, etc. But the Zombie is not interested in the pursuit of truth – its citations are externally-controlled and directed at non-scientific goals, and inside the Zombie everything is rotten…..

Scientists are usually too careful and clever to risk telling outright lies, but instead they push the envelope of exaggeration, selectivity and distortion as far as possible. And tolerance for this kind of untruthfulness has greatly increased over recent years. So it is now routine for scientists deliberately to ‘hype’ the significance of their status and performance and ‘spin’ the importance of their research.

No the blog isn’t dead…it is simply refocusing on to stuff I can control. Politics have spun out of control and I am so disheartened by the entire mess that I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Diet is a lot more interesting.

Vitamin D is perhaps best known for its role in bone formation, and vitamin D deficiency is an established cause of rickets soft, deformed bones in children, as well as a potential underlying factor in osteoporosis. In recent years, the role of vitamin D in muscle function has come to the fore. Two potential features of vitamin D deficiency are muscle pain and fatigue. Not so long ago, I wrote here about how my vitamin D-deficient mother seemed to be profoundly helped through supplementation with vitamin D. via Vitamin D improves energy production in muscles of vitamin D-deficient people | Dr Briffas Blog – A Good Look at Good Health.

Last year, one of my friends lost her husband. After decades of marriage, they said their final goodbyes. Since I work in a mortuary, I often witness some of the worst days of people’s lives. And that day was no different. My friend’s husband, the father of her children, was gone. No matter what anyone said or did, nothing could change that unfortunate truth. She was sad, but she had embraced the inevitable. My friend had loved her husband for over fifty years, but she was beginning to accept the fact that he would never come home.

Lessons from my grieving friend

“One day, you’ll sit where I sit.” She spoke to me in a shaky voice. And although her words were cryptic, I knew exactly what she meant. She meant that one day I would lose the people I love most. I listened intently to what she was saying.

“One day, you’ll sit where I sit and you won’t believe how the time flew by.” I knew she was right. I had already begun to notice the quickened pace of life that older folks are always talking about. After all, I have witnessed it firsthand with my own children. It seems like they were just babies a moment ago. In a few months, my oldest daughter will be four.

Found this page today…love it. This is only a very small snippet of the goodness found there.

OBSERVATIONS ON POSTURING INTELLECTUALS

“If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.” — Dr. Milton Friedman

“There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility.” – Teddy Roosevelt, Abilene, KS, May 2, 1903

“We Americans are lucky to live in a country with a history full of noble ideas, great leaders, and awe-inspiring accomplishments. Sadly, many of our elites want no part of it.” –Michael Barone

“…Shockingly, half of all Americans have IQs below the median [And not so shockingly, many ‘intellectuals’ have no sense of humor]. But intelligence is not the same thing as wisdom or sense. Very intelligent people have been known to advance very compelling arguments on behalf of very bad ideas. … What’s more, there is a particular type of stupidity to which intelligent people are uniquely prone: intellectual snobbery, or the tendency to cultivate an attitude of contempt toward those who are not as bright. This may appeal to New York Times readers or voters in, say, Hyde Park — that is, to people who think they’re better than everyone else too.” — James Taranto

“People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge.” –Dr. Thomas Sowell

“No single person possesses anything close to the invisible collective knowledge held by the society as a whole.” — Jonah Goldberg, paraphrasing Friedrich Hayek, here

“The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated.” — Robert Nozick, PhD (1986)

“The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain any more so it eats it. It’s rather like getting tenure.” — Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“…the vast majority of intellectuals don’t really originate any ideas, but they peddle ideas that other people have originated. And that gives them a great deal of freedom, because ideas are so malleable. Words are so malleable. Reality is not malleable. And so, they can believe in all sorts of things which have no realistic possibility, and which are fatal time and again in history. But because they know how to rephrase it and repackage it, they can just keep right on going.” –Thomas Sowell to Brian Lamb

“It’s the Intellectual’s Curse. What causes people to be intellectuals is a disposition to think that abstractions and concepts are more real than actual reality – so they become more afraid of the hypothetical consequences of the abstractions in their brains than by concrete threats in the real world.” — Jack Wheeler“Few of the great tragedies of history were created by the village idiot, and many by the village genius.”- Thomas Sowell

“An intellectual is someone who, upon being shown something that works in practice, wonders if it would work in theory”” — Rick Gaber, paraphrasing Ronald Reagan

“Never allow anyone who’s never worked in the real world, who could only get a government job or teaching job, tell you how to run your life — or how to think about it.” — Dan Skinner

“Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.” –Dr. Thomas Sowell

“Dalrymple’s latest book, published this year, is titled Our Culture, What’s Left of Itand now he takes a look at the intellectual and political elite, as well as the underclass that has served as guinea pigs for their social experiments. His account of the smug ignorance of this elite is as chilling as his account of the catastrophic effects of their notions on society.” –Dr. Thomas Sowell

“The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy.” –Thomas Sowell

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.” — Thomas Sowell

“Many academicians and self-styled intellectuals, with a habitually arrogant and condescending attitude, treat the rest of the world with contempt. These so-called ‘intelligentsia’ congratulate themselves for, not only having high IQs and lots of education in their particular fields, but for having achieved the allegedly momentous insight that free-market capitalism and pure altruism are ultimately incompatible (duh). Yet they’re still too damned stupid to realize, and too damned ignorant to acknowledge, that altruism is NOT the only moral code available to mankind. (It is, in fact, the bloodiest and most regressive one of all). This stunted thinking has resulted in their committing the intellectual atrocity of rejecting the capitalism and freedom instead of the altruism and coercion.” — Rick Gaber

“The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, [but that his use of brutality was] the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced.” –Ayn Rand

John Noveske of Noveske Rifle Works compiled a list of perps responsible for murders of mulitiple people. See if you can spot the common thread.

Eric Harris age 17 (first on Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan Klebold aged 18 (Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado#, killed 12 students and 1 teacher, and wounded 23 others, before killing themselves. Klebold’s medical records have never been made available to the public.

Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac #three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather’s girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota. He then shot himself. 10 dead, 12 wounded.

Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, Wahluke (Washington state) High School, was on Paxil (which caused him to have hallucinations) when he took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage. He has no memory of the event.

Chris Fetters, age 13, killed his favorite aunt while taking Prozac.

Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.

Mathew Miller, age 13, hung himself in his bedroom closet after taking Zoloft for 6 days.

Kip Kinkel, age 15, (on Prozac and Ritalin) shot his parents while they slept then went to school and opened fire killing 2 classmates and injuring 22 shortly after beginning Prozac treatment.

Luke Woodham, age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then killed two students, wounding six others.

A boy in Pocatello, ID (Zoloft) in 1998 had a Zoloft-induced seizure that caused an armed stand off at his school.

Michael Carneal (Ritalin), age 14, opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three teenagers were killed, five others were wounded..

A young man in Huntsville, Alabama (Ritalin) went psychotic chopping up his parents with an ax and also killing one sibling and almost murdering another.

TJ Solomon, age 15, (Ritalin) high school student in Conyers, Georgia opened fire on and wounded six of his class mates.

Rod Mathews, age 14, (Ritalin) beat a classmate to death with a bat.

James Wilson, age 19, (various psychiatric drugs) from Breenwood, South Carolina, took a .22 caliber revolver into an elementary school killing two young girls, and wounding seven other children and two teachers.

Elizabeth Bush, age 13, (Paxil) was responsible for a school shooting in Pennsylvania

Jarred Viktor, age 15, (Paxil), after five days on Paxil he stabbed his grandmother 61 times.

Chris Shanahan, age 15 (Paxil) in Rigby, ID who out of the blue killed a woman.

Jeff Franklin (Prozac and Ritalin), Huntsville, AL, killed his parents as they came home from work using a sledge hammer, hatchet, butcher knife and mechanic’s file, then attacked his younger brothers and sister.

Neal Furrow (Prozac) in LA Jewish school shooting reported to have been court-ordered to be on Prozac along with several other medications.

Kevin Rider, age 14, was withdrawing from Prozac when he died from a gunshot wound to his head. Initially it was ruled a suicide, but two years later, the investigation into his death was opened as a possible homicide. The prime suspect, also age 14, had been taking Zoloft and other SSRI antidepressants.

Alex Kim, age 13, hung himself shortly after his Lexapro prescription had been doubled.

Diane Routhier was prescribed Welbutrin for gallstone problems. Six days later, after suffering many adverse effects of the drug, she shot herself.

Billy Willkomm, an accomplished wrestler and a University of Florida student, was prescribed Prozac at the age of 17. His family found him dead of suicide – hanging from a tall ladder at the family’s Gulf Shore Boulevard home in July 2002.

Kara Jaye Anne Fuller-Otter, age 12, was on Paxil when she hung herself from a hook in her closet. Kara’s parents said “…. the damn doctor wouldn’t take her off it and I asked him to when we went in on the second visit. I told him I thought she was having some sort of reaction to Paxil…”)

Gareth Christian, Vancouver, age 18, was on Paxil when he committed suicide in 2002,
(Gareth’s father could not accept his son’s death and killed himself.)

Julie Woodward, age 17, was on Zoloft when she hung herself in her family’s detached garage.

Matthew Miller was 13 when he saw a psychiatrist because he was having difficulty at school. The psychiatrist gave him samples of Zoloft. Seven days later his mother found him dead, hanging by a belt from a laundry hook in his closet.

Kurt Danysh, age 18, and on Prozac, killed his father with a shotgun. He is now behind prison bars, and writes letters, trying to warn the world that SSRI drugs can kill.

Woody ____, age 37, committed suicide while in his 5th week of taking Zoloft. Shortly before his death his physician suggested doubling the dose of the drug. He had seen his physician only for insomnia. He had never been depressed, nor did he have any history of any mental illness symptoms.

A boy from Houston, age 10, shot and killed his father after his Prozac dosage was increased.

Hammad Memon, age 15, shot and killed a fellow middle school student. He had been diagnosed with ADHD and depression and was taking Zoloft and “other drugs for the conditions.”

Matti Saari, a 22-year-old culinary student, shot and killed 9 students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine.

Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.

Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen, age 18, had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School – then he committed suicide.
Asa Coon from Cleveland, age 14, shot and wounded four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon was on Trazodone.

Jon Romano, age 16, on medication for depression, fired a shotgun at a teacher in his
New York high school.

Missing from list… 3 of 4 known to have taken these same meds….

What drugs was Jared Lee Loughner on, age 21…… killed 6 people and injuring 14 others in Tuscon, Az

What drugs was James Eagan Holmes on, age 24….. killed 12 people and injuring 59 others in Aurora Colorado

If you think the police have a duty to protect…bzzzt wrong. They have a duty to draw pretty little lines around your dead body. While there are many honorable police officers who WOULD put their life on the line for you, it isn’t their duty. So while you are dialing 911 for help you better have already gotten your weapon ready to defend yourself.

WASHINGTON, June 27 – The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband making an arrest mandatory for a violation.

The decision, with an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia and dissents from Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, overturned a ruling by a federal appeals court in Colorado. The appeals court had permitted a lawsuit to proceed against a Colorado town, Castle Rock, for the failure of the police to respond to a woman’s pleas for help after her estranged husband violated a protective order by kidnapping their three young daughters, whom he eventually killed.

For hours on the night of June 22, 1999, Jessica Gonzales tried to get the Castle Rock police to find and arrest her estranged husband, Simon Gonzales, who was under a court order to stay 100 yards away from the house. He had taken the children, ages 7, 9 and 10, as they played outside, and he later called his wife to tell her that he had the girls at an amusement park in Denver.

Ms. Gonzales conveyed the information to the police, but they failed to act before Mr. Gonzales arrived at the police station hours later, firing a gun, with the bodies of the girls in the back of his truck. The police killed him at the scene.

The theory of the lawsuit Ms. Gonzales filed in federal district court in Denver was that Colorado law had given her an enforceable right to protection by instructing the police, on the court order, that “you shall arrest” or issue a warrant for the arrest of a violator. She argued that the order gave her a “property interest” within the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s due process guarantee, which prohibits the deprivation of property without due process.

How can you communicate more effectively with an anti–gun person who is using unhealthy defense mechanisms? There are no quick and easy answers. But there are a few things you should keep in mind.

Anger and attacks do not work

Most gun owners, when confronted by an anti–gun person, become angry and hostile. This is understandable, because gun owners increasingly face ridicule, persecution and discrimination. (If you don’t believe this, ask yourself if anyone would seriously introduce legislation to ban African–Americans, women, or Jews from post offices, schools, and churches. Even convicted felons aren’t banned from such places – but peaceful armed citizens are!) But an angry response is counterproductive.

It’s not helpful to attack the person you’re trying to persuade. Anything that makes him feel more fearful or angry will only intensify his defenses. Your goal is to help the person feel safe, and then to provide experiences and information that will help him to make informed decisions.

Be Gentle

You should never try to break down a defense mechanism by force. Remember that defense mechanisms protect people from feelings they cannot handle, and if you take that protection away, you can cause serious psychological harm. And because defe

Why you must not, ever, simply accept what you are being told by any “expert”. Doctors are, as a group, especially prone to group think. Consider that the school discussed below, Johns Hopkins, is one of the top medical schools in the world. Consider that a few of the students, future doctors, got up and left instead of having their core beliefs challenged. Do you want one of them telling you how to be healthy?

Today, as a required activity for our Hopkins Med endocrinology course, we watched excerpts Supersize Me and Tom Naughton’s Fat Head. Our professor then engaged us in a discussion comparing the two films. Our professor told our class that the lipid hypothesis is incorrect, said that the USDA Food Pyramid is the product of corn and wheat subsidies (and lobbies), and definitely stirred up some uneasy responses from my classmates.

My dog was hit by a car the other day and the amazingly loud sound of him hitting the bumper is still with me. I never used to undertand how close people could be with their dogs.

Sure, I have had a lot of dogs and I thought I really liked them. But none of them compare to Frodo. He is a golden doodle who is smarter than the average 3 year old, hell he is probably smarter than a bunch of 15 year olds. We have been building a fantastic rapport him and I. He is the first dog I have ever had that responds to pointing, the first that doesn’t run off, the first that listens to commands (most of the time) and he is always excited by my arrival. Something that cannot be said about the rest of my family, no fault of theirs. Dogs love you unconditionally, families remember your faults, dogs forget them immediately. He is a big dog but not big enough to prevent his tail-wagging routine to move his entire body when I come into view. So yea, I now pretty much completely understand those people who claim they LOVE their dogs, we, all five of us, love Frodo…

Frodo and I were in my nearly half an acre of yard early one morning last week while he was going about his business. You can see the street from where we are but it is a long ways off. We didn’t have a fence, we do now. Well, I saw his big floppy head perk up and I yelled at him to SIT! Didn’t work. For a 75 pound dog he is astoundingly quick. I ran after him just in time to hear that sickening sound (I too made a sound I have never heard from myself…and never want to hear again) and see him bounce off the front bumper, thank goodness he didn’t go under. He bounced off the bumper into the ground got up and kept running into the neighbors front yard then he finally responded to my commands and sat down. He then looked at me like…WTF just happened! THAT SHIT HURT! I ran over to him and gave him a hug not believing he was looking at me instead of being gone…my eyes were a little blurry but I looked him over and squeezed all of his body gently to see if anything was busted…no yelps. Started to think we might have dodged a big ass bullet.

Stood up from checking his body and said come and he looked at me as if to say NO FREAKING WAY, I am just gonna sit here until all this shit stops spinning and all those DAMN CARS are gone! Understanding that he was terrified I went over and picked him up and carried him into the house. He was ok, we went to the vet and confirmed it but he was ok…

I built a fence that afternoon on my break between morning and evening time at the Club. Sorry buddy I let you down by not having a fence earlier. Now I am just waiting for that sound to go away…that damn sound.

“The price of freedom is the willingness to do sudden battle anywhere, any time and with utter recklessness.”

“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”

“You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.”

“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”

“Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.”

“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.”

“Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.”

“A slave cannot be freed, save he do it himself. Nor can you enslave a free man; the very most you can do is kill him!”

“Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don’t walk. At least not what we do when we walk. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s much more complex and utterly delightful. They don’t move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions . . . and all of it graceful.”

The following paleo success stories are for my mom who needs some inspiration to start kicking ass again! You are never too old to start kicking ass, just pick on people who eat sugar!

First up is a man who nearly dies at age 79…he is lifting weights and walking again. Hell he isn’t on a respirator anymore…

My family is living proof that it is never too late to do the right thing. A year ago almost to the day I write this, my father nearly died. He had been unhealthy and ignorant of his diet all his life. My mother frequently attempted to put him on diets, and I remember as a child often finding candy wrappers in the car from his secret binges. He fell victim to poor education and deceptive, mislabeled products (such as chocolate-covered “blueberries” that he believed to be a nutritious alternative to standard sweets which were really blue-dyed sugary blueberry flavored jellies covered in processed chocolate “glaze”). After he retired, he began spending much of his day watching tv, barely active (due in large part, I’m sure, to his declining energy from the low quality food he was eating).

My husband and I had some success with the Atkins diet over the years (this was the closest exposure we’d had to the paleo diet where the science of food began to make sense-i.e. take out the carbs, bring in the fat). We tried to educate my father. At his request, we would throw away the processed food whenever we visited. But he was hopelessly addicted, didn’t have the proper education to understand why what he was eating was hurting him, and the bad foods would come right back in. It never stuck. He was routinely diagnosed as “prediabetic” even though his fasting blood glucose levels were up at 120 mg/dl and his A1C stayed around 6.0. His triglycerides hit 177 and his HDL risk factor was 5.6. [these numbers were from his routine physical in 2010]. His diet was only addressed by his doctors as a stern general warning that he’d best “eat healthy or lose a foot to diabetes” someday. Of course eating “healthy” included lots of whole grains and avoiding fat.

I grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm a long time ago. 71 years old as I write this. Have been eating grains and grain products — anything made with flour — my whole life. I liked bread — especially when it was loaded with butter.

It was Gary Taubes’ Why We Get Fat that encouraged me to pursue other reading with the same subject material. That was when I found The Primal Blueprint. Both books spoke to me. Just made sense. That was early last summer. It was a poor time to start new eating habits when I would be dining with friends and relatives during my summer in Colorado.

Both books said to eliminate grain products from the diet. I believe my diet always was healthy. Never did buy into the low fat craze. The new variation (my paleo version) emphasized salads, vegetables, some legumes and meats (grass feed beef) or chicken (dirty feet free range) or fish (wild). However, the grain products still had a very small place in the diet along with the occasional sweets.

About two months ago, it was time to get serious and eliminate the grain products (breads, pasta, sweet rolls, pretzels) from my diet. After about two weeks, I realized that I was no longer gobbling antacid pills after many meals. Interesting. Costco was going to be in trouble economically. For many years, a large economy size container of antacids had a place in my larder. I ate them like candy after almost every meal.

Now let’s fast forward to July of 2010. I sat in my doctor’s office following his exam. He told me that my A1C had been progressively elevating and was now at 7.1. The diabetes pills were no longer effective for me. It was time for me to escalate on to insulin injections. My cholesterol was a whopping 250 and something more needed to be done to reduce it. My EKG apparently showed some abnormalities and he was referring me to a cardiologist. My creatinine levels were also a cause for concern; it appeared that I might have Stage II kidney disease, so he was referring me to a nephrologist as well.

My dad (deceased) had Type I Diabetes which was diagnosed when he was but a teenager and my older brother has Type II Diabetes. Both had to take insulin shots several times daily and I saw firsthand what that entailed and have seen my father in diabetic comas on several occasions. Not pretty! I have also known acquaintances who have suffered eye hemorrhages and amputations due to diabetes. I feared that my health was taking a huge nose dive.

I ask that you try to put yourselves briefly into my shoes for a moment. At this time of my life I am 63 years old. My physical health was progressively failing. I had chronic back pain in both upper and lower back, elbow tendonitis, loss of bone density and terribly achy joints. I could no longer do a single push up or even a sit up. It seemed that my muscles had atrophied from sitting at a desk all day with little to no physical exercise.

One of these days…after the house is built and the Corvette restored, maybe before the Vette, I am gonna build one of these. Darn rifles are so darn sexy! Sort of hard to believe anyone would decide to shoot anything else. Accurate out to 200 yards if you are a man who knows very well what you are about and able to throw a big enough piece of lead down range to down a buffalo, so big enough for social purposes.

Been to two Appleseed shoots…improved both times, but still a cook. Here is why it is important to remember this date in history. All governments, can when left unattended by disinterested citizens, can become tyrannical. When those governments do degrade into oppressive out of control monsters it is the duty of those governed to bring them back into line. No one else can or should, because no one else has as much self-interest as those under the oppression.

Lest We Forget – April 19, 1775It’s easy in the hustle and bustle of everyday life to forget things that are important – and one day in American history – you can argue it is THE most important day – should never be forgotten. It’s the day our fellow Americans took up arms to win liberty for all of us.

April 19, 1775. A Wednesday, back then. It’s hard for us moderns to understand how tough it was, or to understand the magnitude of what they did. Contrary to the common, somewhat vague image of illiterate farmers caught up in the emotions of the moment and heading out to take potshots at the redcoats, the reality of it was far different. In 1774 by order of the English Parliament the port of Boston was closed until damages for the Boston Tea Party were paid.

Closed, can you imagine it? The busiest port in the colonies, everyone out of work, people nearly starving. The city kept alive by donations of food from the other colonies. And yet, Americans were determined not to pay those damages. So English troops arrived, as the British took over local government to ensure compliance. By April 1775, tensions were high, with the King and Parliament pressuring British General Gage to take action.

On the night of April 18, 1775 – a Tuesday – Gage dispatched ten companies of Light Infantry and Grenadiers on a rapid expedition to Concord to ferret out military stockpiles he suspected were there. The ‘embattled farmers’ found out beforehand, and took action. Paul Revere rode, and he did not ride randomly. Every house at which he stopped saw another rider taking off in a different direction to sound the alarm. By dawn, as the British redcoat column was approaching Lexington (five miles short of Concord), historians have estimated 14,000 Americans were converging on them from miles around. Not a cell phone among them. Not one on the internet. Not even a single telephone. Yet in a few hours, 14,000 trained men were marching through the night. Think you, with your cell phone and email, could do it today?

Even now, it’d a remarkable accomplishment – doubtless impossible to repeat today. To get that many people turned out, on short notice, in the middle of the night. Maybe they cared about freedom, do you think?

It almost makes you wonder: do you think we care as much about freedom, today? Enough to get out of the bed in the middle of the night, and fast-march 15, 18, or 20 miles to face British lead and steel? With a single-shot, muzzle-loading musket?

Maybe you begin to understand the magnitude of the debt we owe the Founders. It sure looks, from the perspective of the 21st century, like a mighty accomplishment, something we couldn’t do again, today. But they did it. They did not draw back. They did not shirk. They did not shrink from the call. And for that, we – each of us – owe them thanks.

By now, we all know the story of Capt. John Parker and his 77 militiamen who stood waiting on Lexington Green. If he indeed said "If they mean to have a war, let them have it here!" he said inspiring words. But the historical facts are that the British fired a sudden volley, killing 8 Americans and wounding another 8 (a twenty-percent casualty rate), whereas the few shots our boys got off in return nicked the leg of a redcoat private and grazed a horse. Considering the American marksmanship displayed later throughout the day, it suggests the British actually surprised them – and indeed some thought the Brits were firing blanks to scare them, until the first musket balls whistled by.

Oddly enough, the encounter at Lexington did not start the War. Nor did the later encounter at the North Bridge.

The North Bridge at Concord is an example of the ‘fog of war’ – the colonists, uncertain of what happened at Lexington, retreated before the Brits as they approached Concord, eventually winding up north of the river at their militia training ground on Punkatasset Hill. This allowed the Brits to occupy and search the town, recovering items that looked ‘military’, which they piled up and set on fire. It was the sight of the column of smoke above the trees that alarmed our guys – as one said – "are we going to stand by idly, while they burn our houses?" – setting the stage for the march to the North Bridge, where they were fired upon by three British companies posted there. To the cry of "Fire, fellow soldiers, for God’s sake, fire! – fire as fast as you can!" their training and practice in marksmanship broke the British, who fled to Concord. And the militia crossed the North Bridge.

It was a remarkable moment in American history. That April morning was the first time Americans were ordered to fire on British troops. And the first time they killed the King’s soldiers. Even now, the War did not break out. The American militia, having defended itself successfully after being fired upon, and maybe realizing what they had done by firing on the King’s troops – it must be a terrific blow to rise out of bed a citizen and have the sun set on you as a traitor – took up positions behind a nearby wall.

Time was rapidly approaching noon, and the British began a hasty retreat back toward Boston – and Lexington. Just outside Concord, as the end of the column was crossing a bridge at a place called Merriam’s Corner (where the road made a sharp turn), the British rear guard turned and fired a volley at Americans following them. At that, militia units concealed on the north side of the road opened fire on the red-clad column to protect and support their brethren. At that point, it became a shooting war, and the 18-mile road back to Boston taken by the redcoats has ever since been known as Battle Road. Did the boys from Lexington get a second chance? You bet.

Did the British nearly get caught in a trap? You bet.

Was it a ‘close-run’ thing for General Gage’s men? You bet.

If to forget is to show disrespect, let’s not forget what they did that day.

It has truly been said that April 19, 1775 was "the Day Marksmanship met History, and Liberty was born".

Don’t let the memory of their deeds be forgotten. Read this to your kids – or let them read it for themselves.

The founders knew the price they paid for liberty. They hoped their posterity would remember that price, and never let liberty go. In fact, John Adams, our second president, left us a message. I paraphrase: "Posterity, you will never know the price my generation paid for your freedom… "If you ever forget – if you ever forget – we’ll be sorry we ever made the effort." Have Americans forgot? I hope not.

Go to the library. There you’ll find books devoted to that first day of the American Revolution. The first day in history where a people stood up to tyranny and won their freedom on the battlefield. You’ll read how close we came to capturing the entire British column. You’ll read how propaganda was effectively used by American liberty-lovers to advance the cause of Liberty. You’ll read about a day of contrasts – the elation of victory, the mourning for dead and wounded comrades, the exhaustion of battle, the misery of burning homes and lost relatives, of temporary graves by the roadside, of whole towns in flight.

It all happened. It was real. It was the beginning of the liberty you inherited, which you hardly think about, the liberty you so take for granted. Those guys who didn’t take it for granted, who fought for liberty, who turned out to the sound of midnight alarm bells – they deserve better than that. Take a minute, and think about them this April 19.

April 19th, the day the Founders took on the world’s mightiest army – with muzzle-loading firearms. They did it for you.

To remember them, is the least we can do. To remember them, is to honor them. It is little enough to ask…

I am reading a remarkable book, THE MIRACULOUS RESULTS OF EXTREMELY HIGH DOSES OF THE SUNSHINE HORMONE VITAMIN D3 by Jeff T Bowles, that is blowing me away. His hypothesis that many of today’s ailments can be traced to our low levels of vitamin D is fascinating. But what is striking to me are some of the questions he asks, for instance when he wonders why our blood sugar can skyrocket he comes to the remarkable conclusion that it might have something to do with changing of seasons and hibernating. This leads him to the hypothesis that the hormone Vitamin D might be responsible as the levels in our blood rise and fall due to the length of the day. This may alert our body to put on fat and protect our body from cold. Here is Jeff:

I then started wondering about blood sugar. What in the world could increased blood sugar protect you from? And then it hit me! I remembered some experiments that were conducted on a (poor) Beagle where they wanted to put the dog into suspended animation with no vital signs and then see if he could be resuscitated. They did this by reducing his body temperature to about freezing. In order to prevent freezing damage to his tissues, they added a large amount of glycerol to his blood. This lowered the freezing point of his blood so that they could reduce his body temperature dramatically and not worry about crystallization damage. I also remembered this is what they do to people’s bodies who have signed up to be frozen upon death with hopes of being resurrected in the future after technology advances make resuscitation possible (good luck). AHA! Possibly high glucose levels in the blood protect the hibernating body from the danger of tissue damage due to freezing! By boosting the sugar level of blood, it reduces blood’s freezing and crystallization temperature! Keep Reading »

Getting some push-back from relatives regarding my diet which now not only includes Very Low Carbohydrate (VLC) regime but also a Intermittent Fasting (IF) component. I eat one VLC meal a day for dinner. Some of my relatives seem to think that this sort of regime is “not good for me”. Specifically they have a problem with the fasting part. Let’s see what the experts say.

First let me lead off with the first article below regarding Calorie Restriction which is the only proven way to radically extend life on test animals. The Wiki link explains that they are seeing increases of 30 to40% in the life spans of rats and mice. In primates the results are not yet final as they tend to live a lot longer. But so far in the 20th year of the study 80% of the calorie restricted monkey’s are still alive compared to 50% of the controls. Additionally the dieting monkey’s show significantly less diabetes, cancer, and heart and brain disease.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Reduce, recycle and rebuild is as important to the most basic component of the human body, the cell, as it is to the environment. And a University of Florida study shows just how much the body benefits when it “goes green,” at least if you’re a rat: Cutting calories helps rodents live longer by boosting cells’ ability to recycle damaged parts so they can maintain efficient energy production. via University of Florida News – UF scientists reveal how dietary restriction cleans cells.

So then after that article let’s discuss a way of perhaps getting the same results without having to starve all the time. First off a study showing that the protective effects of Calorie Restriction (CR) are also seen in patients who fast but while calorie restriction can take weeks to months to be effective, fasting gives results within days. From the study:

Preliminary reports indicate that fasting for up to 5 days followed by a normal diet, may also protect patients against chemotherapy without causing chronic weight loss. By contrast, the long-term 20 to 40% restriction in calorie intake (dietary restriction, DR), whose effects on cancer progression have been studied extensively for decades, requires weeks-months to be effective, causes much more modest changes in glucose and/or IGF-I levels, and promotes chronic weight loss in both rodents and humans.

What did you have for dinner tonight? I had a steak, cauliflower with butter, asparagus with even more butter with everything topped with an outstanding blue cheese sauce…amazing meal. I ate the fat and the protein…amazing.

World Renown Heart Surgeon Speaks Out On What Really Causes Heart Disease

We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is. I freely admit to being wrong.. As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries,today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact.

I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labelled “opinion makers.” Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol.

The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice.

It Is Not Working!

These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated.

The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences.

Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before.

Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year.

Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes. Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended. It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped.

Inflammation is not complicated — it is quite simply your body’s natural defence to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin or virus. The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your body from these bacterial and viral invaders. However, if wechronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process,a condition occurs called chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial.

What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body? Well,smokers perhaps, but at least they made that choice willfully.

The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream dietthat is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels. Thisrepeated injury creates chronic inflammation leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity.

Let me repeat that: The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet recommended for years by mainstream medicine.

What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods.

Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.

Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall. Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation.

While we savor the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond alarmingly as if a foreign invader arrived declaring war.Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed withomega-6 oils for long shelf life have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been slowly poisoning everyone.

How does eating a simple sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you sick?

Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.

When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.

What does all this have to do with inflammation? Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.

While you may not be able to see it, rest assured it is there. I saw it in over 5,000 surgical patients spanning 25 years who all shared one common denominator — inflammation in their arteries.

Let’s get back to the sweet roll. That innocent looking goody not only contains sugars, it is baked in one of many omega-6 oils such as soybean. Chips and fries are soaked in soybean oil; processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6’s are essential -they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell — they must be in the correct balance with omega-3’s.

If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation.

Today’s mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That’s a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today’s food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.

To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and finally, Alzheimer’s disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated.There is no escaping the fact that the more we consume prepared and processed foods, the more we trip the inflammation switch little by little each day. The human body cannot process, nor was it designed to consume, foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.

There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such ascolorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation- causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them.

Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6 and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly healthy oils labelled polyunsaturated. Forget the “science” that has been drummed into your head for decades. The science that saturated fat alone causes heart disease is non-existent. The science that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol is also very weak. Since we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, the concern about saturated fat is even more absurd today.

The cholesterol theory led to the no-fat, low-fat recommendations that in turn created the very foods now causing an epidemic of inflammation. Mainstream medicine made a terrible mistake when it advised people to avoid saturated fat in favor of foods high in omega-6 fats. We now have an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.

What you can do is choose whole foods your grandmother served and not those your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients from fresh unprocessed food, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet.

Dr. Dwight Lundell is the past Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital , Mesa , AZ. His private practice, Cardiac Care Center was in Mesa, AZ. Recently Dr. Lundell left surgery to focus on the nutritional treatment of heart disease. He is the founder of Healthy Humans Foundation that promotes human health with a focus on helping large corporations promote wellness. He is also the author of The Cure for Heart Disease and The Great Cholesterol Lie.

Last year, Karen slow cooked a large brisket for dinner we were all looking forward to having it for days afterwards as leftovers. Frodo, our Goldendoodle had other plans and I learned about diet because of those plans.

As we were eating in the dining room my eldest daughter spotted the fact that the brisket was no longer in the spot we had served it from…odd. We went to investigate and there, with a somewhat guilty look on his face, was our 4th child…licking his considerable chops after stripping off all of the fat from the brisket. The muscle was all intact mind you…Frodo is no dummy, he knows what is good for him, first you get the fat cause your master might catch you in the act and you want to make sure you get the good stuff first.

Now take a look at these diagrams and find out how similar you are to Frodo and then ask yourself why it is such a good idea to be eating all those grains, legumes and greenery in general? Btw did you know that if you eat only protein and no fat you will get something called rabbits disease?

Carnivore Digestive System

Compare the human digestive system to the herbivore digestive system and to the canine digestive system. Here is the unmistakable answer to whether humans are herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore.

It is remarkable how similar the human digestive system is to a dog’s!

A pure carnivore has a simple tube for an intestinal system. That tube has a bulge at the beginning of it that serves as a stomach. The tube then winds and twists inside the abdomen of the carnivore. It needs to – it is roughly 6 times longer than the animal is, when measured in a living animal.

Starting at the mouth, here is how a carnivore digestive system works:

Jaws and Teeth:

Carnivores have canine teeth, also called carnivore teeth. The adult canine teeth of a dog number 42. Canine teeth rip and tear the flesh of its prey, and the jaws chew up and down, rather than side to side. Many times the carnivore ‘wolfs’ his food nearly whole. Some carnivores can go several days before they need to hunt and feed again.

Stomach:
A dog’s stomach can hold about 2 quarts of contents (4 pints, or 8 cups). It secretes hydrochloric acid for digesting and breaking down the food into liquid ‘chyme.’

Small Intestine:
Once broken down into its constituent parts, the small intestine is where the nutrients get absorbed into the blood stream. Digestion and absorption of nutrients (fat and protein) is extremely efficient. Less than 4% of fat, and just trace amounts of protein make it beyond the small intestine into the large intestine.

Carnivores have NO enzymes for digesting cellulose, a complex carbohydrate and the main building block in plant cell walls. Obligate carnivores such as dogs cannot digest cellulose.

Cecum:
The cecum in a carnivore digestive system is a tiny useless appendage. You may recognize the word appendix, which is the ‘cecum’ in humans. In both humans and dogs, the cecum has no known use, though we figure it’s gotta be good for something.

Large Intestine:
The large intestine (colon) serves a single purpose – to reabsorb the water out of the waste material. Anything left over at the other end of the long tube passes out and turns into manure.

Intestinal Flora:
Thanks to the hydrochloric acid in the stomach, the entire intestinal tract is close to sterile, until the large intestine. A very large population of healthy bacteria resides in the colon. This natural gut flora participates in immune system function by competing with and helping to minimize the presence of dangerous bacteria. While the bacteria manufacture b-vitamins, biotin, vitamin K and folic acid, it is unclear whether these nutrients are bioavailable to the carnivore.

The link below goes on to show a herbivore’s digestive track as well as a human’s.

First off let me explain that this feels a bit like bragging…truth is it probably is bragging. But I excuse this blatant self praise by hoping that some middle aged fat bastard might read this and grab a hold of life again. It feels EXCELLENT to be stronger than I have been in 35 years. Heck I might even be stronger than that…regardless it is doable. You don’t have to be a fat ass, but you have to want it. I hope that my blatant bragging might be enough to get someone off their asses and get their youth back.

January 2011 after getting my big fat 245 pound ass kicked by the flu, first time my family ever saw me in bed sick, and then being told I was too fat to get the best rate by a medical exam for life insurance (flu scared the wife into realizing I wasn’t going to live forever) I decided it was time to stop abusing my health and do something about it. This would be the third time in my life that I lost a lot of weight. The first time was at 30 years old when I stared into the mirror shaving one morning and a fat bastard with a big belly looked back at me. The second time was some years after quitting smoking when I gained all my weight back that I had lost 7 years previous. The first time I lost my weight I did it by riding around 2 to 4 hours a day on my bicycle in Las Vegas. I don’t remember my diet but I know I was eating a lot of pasta. The second time, at 46, I did it by using Atkins. Matter of fact I can remember the exact day I fell off my diet…had the kids with me walking into Albertsons grocery store and the evil bastards had a Krispy Kreme display by the front door. Well hell I picked up a dozen glazed and finished them off by myself before I got to the register…think I might have growled at the kids when they asked for one.

Here I am in January 2011. Fat bastard hit 245 once…didn’t tell the wife cause it was too embarrassing.

Right about this time I am reading Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It by Gary Taubes. I had read Good Calories Bad Calories the year before so I had zero excuse regarding my weight. At 54 years old after a lifetime of sports from Judo to Cross Country Motorcycle racing I was officially a fat-body. Was this it? Was this all I had? Was this the moment in time when I chucked feeling good out of the window and accepted being an old fat-body full of arthritis, pain and suffering…or did I have it in me to get well, get lean and get strong one more time? I got started…with a vengeance.

Having bought Gary Taubes book Good Calories Bad Calories the previous year I knew how, I just had never followed through. But I was finally realizing that by being a fat-body I was risked not only being round and weak, but much worse, I was actually risking not being present when my kids 7, 9 and 13 grew up and had their own. Of course, losing weight is no guarantee of living forever but your odds go up and making your odds worse by bad choices seems wrong.

With “Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It” I went to work. Cutting out all forms of sugar cold turkey I saw immediate results. Within a very short time I had lost around 15 pounds and then I ran into an article in Men’s Journal “Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie“. Doing a bit of research into Rob Shaul of Mountain Athlete I discovered that I wasn’t too old to get strong again…no indeed not. Contacted Rob and he sent me a 6 week program for endurance athletes as I didn’t want to join a gym and didn’t want to hurt myself lifting heavy weight as I didn’t have a spotter. Fantastic ass-kicking program that had me getting strong at the same time that I was getting lighter and lighter. Then I stalled at 205 from 245 and nothing I did seemed to be able to get me down below 205…I was officially stuck. This was not going to do.

By this time I had finished the 6 week endurance athlete program and stunned my wife with my new found looks and strength. Indeed one night after watching a movie she dared me in front of our 3 children to carry her across the house, I simply reached down and picked up my gorgeous 6’2” 165 pounds of stunned wife and carried her across the house, it was so easy. But I wasn’t satisfied, I wanted strength and I wanted to get to 190. Read an interview with Gary where he said that as we get older our abuse of our body makes it harder and harder go lose weight by simply cutting out carbohydrates . That was depressing…I knew that insulin had something to do with it but didn’t know how to correct it beyond what I was already doing…staying in mild ketosis all the time.

5 weeks ago I came across a study that showed Intermittent Fasting might help repair the damage done to my insulin sensitivity. So I immediately started eating once a day 5 days a week. I skipped breakfast and lunch 5 days a week. On weekends I eat normally. In two weeks I dropped 8 pounds and by the fifth week I dropped to 195. But I don’t think this is all there is. I have just read about caffeine damaging insulin sensitivity. Given that I might drink 5-8 diet cokes a day I know what I need to do. I wonder what the results will be?

Here I am one year later. About 4 months ago I moved away from weights and started body weight exercises. If you are interested pick up Convict Conditioning. The other day while working out at the beach at LSU Lakes I was doing 5 sets of 5 handstand presses with 5 chin ups between sets, a group of young guys walked up. One of them said that they wouldn’t be doing THOSE…heh. Yea I am pretty happy with the results! Not done yet.

Now get up off your ass and get to work. It is a lot easier than you think.

Because he specifically attacks the feminist version of reality. Because no attacks are permitted against the prevailing wisdom of the left. Because this is a harbinger of how our nation will be run if we continue down the path of political correctness instead of honest discussion of difficult questions. Because men are evil…

Apparently one of the criteria for inclusion is that the story is noted in the national press. Seems like that will be difficult to achieve since it is in the self interest of the national press that this story die. After all offending the feminists who are oppressing men cannot be allowed to happen. The meme of men being evil must be supported in all branches of the elite.

Are you worn down by the continuous public narrative that due to your masculinity, you’re obviously a lesser person, or violent, or criminal, or just fucking guilty?

Quit Whining, Shut Up, and Pay Your Fucking Child Support Payments.

In fact, if you have any complaint about the systematic abrogation of your rights, and you speak up against the marginalization of your identity based on your sex, (if you’re male) and you weather years of public shaming, accusation, theft, violence, and criminalization of your person – you can be assured that nobody cares, and your pain is fodder for comedy, or else it is invisible.

What if a corrupt and profiteering family court system driven by money appropriated from fathers in their child support payments – this court system irrevocably separates you from your children, devastating you while utterly denying your pain, and garnishing your earnings. Tough shit, pay up sucker.

But lets say you endure such prolonged agony and abuse through the courts, and such systematic refusal by the institutions of society to redress any grievance that your last ultimate option to be heard is to literally and actually set yourself on fire and die, burning in public.

Now, lets imagine a world so totally twisted that the media totally blanks this as a news item. That dismissive and scant reporting of this act of political self immolation is written off with throw away lines calling you, the burned corpse – a deadbeat, a lone nut.

Wow what an experience. I grew up handling rifles, handguns and shotguns imagining my whole life that I knew what I was doing. To a certain extent I did as did the other 18 who joined me for a terrific experience in the 90+ heat of Southern Louisiana. But, I quickly realized that Don, the gentle retired physics professor from Kentucky who volunteered to be our instructor, knew a lot more than me and indeed more than the small group of Marines who joined us. We learned about dragging wood, NPOA (Natural Point of Aim), how to use a sling, tighten up groups, breathing, zero sights and in general how to focus on getting hits on the AQT Army Qualification Test from the standing, sitting and prone positions.

We learned this from a man who was slight of build and had a gentle voice with a Kentucky drawl. Part of the weekend is spent hearing the story, as told by Don, of the first day of the Revolution. In his soft Kentucky drawl he told us of the bravery and determination the fighters for this nations freedom had…it was an amazing experience since as he was telling us a story too many of us are not familiar with the other rifle range continued operations. Against the backdrop of the crack of rifles we heard about the ambushes, the sacrifices, the tragedies and the horrors of the war. Horrors that our founders faced squarely. Don was an amazing instructor who volunteered to drive here from Kentucky to run this shoot…he is a man who knows what he is about. His wife rocks too!

Apparently he was also pretty darn good at teaching shooting since out of the 18 who came 6 qualified as riflemen before the two days were through. Looking at other Appleseeds and their success ratio this seems to be a testament to Louisiana shooters as I don’t think most Appleseed events have that sort of success ratio. Btw I did not qualify…my top score was 178 with, you guessed it Don’s rifle.

Karen, the Warden/Wife, went with me to see what it was about…Don didn’t think that the Marlin Papoose she was shooting was doing her any favors since as a survival rifle it is very short and not really meant for taking precise shots. He lent her his Ruger 10/22 that was tricked out with a Hogue Stock, Tech-Sights, and a variety of other neat stuff. Well as soon as he did this she started shooting extremely well. Don had created a monster! He thought that was pretty neat…I thought it was awesome!

Here my friend Larry and my wife, with the white cap, are preparing for a session. Take a look at Karen’s form…knee up, support elbow under the rifle, trigger finger NOT dragging wood, great cheek weld and the resulting group proved the beauty of her form. This is Saturday and it is about 95 degrees. That night Karen dragged me to Academy sports to find a Ruger 10/22…the clerk offered her a pink one. She smiled and said that nah let me see the black one. Tried it out and told me that she didn’t like the way the stock fit her, the cheek weld wasn’t right, said that we would have to find a Hogue Stock and other other tricked out stuff…clerk’s jaw dropped.

The video at the bottom takes you through the entire cycle of the qualifying for Appleseed. We are shooting at the old Army Qualifying Targets set at 25meter. They simulate shots against 100, 200, 300 and 400 yard targets.

I am shooting a Garand purchased from the Civilian Marksmanship Program. It is a Service Grade Rifle that is a tack driver…unfortunately the owner is not. I was telling everyone at the shoot that it was $495 but when I got home it was a bit more than that…$595, oops sorry fellas. My best score with the Garand was 167 or so. My best score with Karen’s favorite rifle, Don’s 22 was 178. I will qualify with my Garand. Anyways enough talk on with the video.

That is Don walking along the back of the line…during the prone position firing you will see him walk up and correct my “dragging wood”.

All in all a fantastic weekend with some terrific folks participating! Thanks Hank! That Brown Bess you allowed all of us to shoot was the perfect ending!

Well another day another vicious attack on a citizen who manages to utter a thought contrary to the meme of the left. Irony is apparently unknown to the left because they take themselves so seriously. How else to explain that they preach tolerance but practice attack and in attack they observe no rules. Exactly how long do they get away with this nonsense before we start getting pissed off?

Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, Bork, Carrie Prejean and with the hate speech law winding its way through Congress pretty soon you and I, will have or already has seen the viciousness of the left.

This sort of screws up the whole argument in support of abortion doesn’t it? After all nearly everyone on the Pro Abortion side declares that these babies are not living beings. Someone forgot to tell this poor baby. Beyond the damage this does to the abortion arguments, this is plain murder. That person should be prosecuted for 2nd degree murder.

Gosh what is our world coming to when we allow such wretched treatment of our young? Whats next redefining when we can abort children to several days after being born? Ooops yup that is exactly where we are going! Sorry cannot find the link but read about a proposal in the EU to do exactly that.

Five in the morning my daughter Marlo comes running through the house screaming that its SNOWING. And it sure is, not those little chickenshit snows that sometimes happen down here but heavy fun snow. Naturally the Legrands went outdoors immediately heh. Homeschool kids have lots of advantages over the indoctrination clan. So at 5:15 in the morning we are outside the girls were outside before that but only as long as it took me to remind them that going outdoors in the snow in their PJs might not be wise. Can you say excited? I know you can. See we dont get snow down here like this very often. Last time we had measurable snow and this measured right around 3 inches, WOW!

Can you believe that the Republicans are losing to THIS party? Within the ranks of the Democrats they have folks who declare such vileness in response to mandatory sentences for those guilty of raping children below age 12. “I’m Asking You To Believe!”

That statement was made by Rep. Fagan Defense attorney and Democratic member of the House, during the debate to enact mandatory 20 year sentences for those FOUND GUILTY…of raping children under 12 years old. Exactly how are Republicans losing to shit heads like that? Jessica’s law apparently offends him…he offends me. Deeply. Around this time some lawyer type is going to pop up like those wacka weasels to defend this stack of shit but screw him…and them.

Yes a case can be made that some of those found guilty in these trials have been later found innocent. But that argues for adjusting the way these trials are conducted, not for what we do to folks after they have been found guilty. Far too many of these predators have found their ways out of jail to murder and rape again. Sex offenders are repeat offenders. Rapists are the worst repeat offenders. And that is when we catch them. Lord knows in the current system catching them in the first place is next to impossible since many don’t report the crime. Then when they do report the crime folks like that stack of shit above make them sorry for reporting it.

In the recent high-profile stories about sex offenders being charged with murder, the criminals should never have been at large. In one case, the offender had failed to register his address, but no one looked for him. In another case, a judge released the offender on bail, even though he had a record of being jailed for sex crimes. In another case, the offender was jailed for a minor charge and then released, because the officials didn’t know that there was a warrant out for his arrest in another state. In other cases, the offenders were released from prison before they served their entire sentence.

A much more detailed article about repeat offenders can be found at Center for Sex Offender Management’s (CSOM).

One method of dealing with this problem is to examine recidivism studies of specific types of sex offenders. This approach is warranted, given the established base rate differences across types of sex offenders. (Recent research suggests that many offenders have histories of assaulting across genders and age groups, rather than against only one specific victim population. Researchers in a 1999 study (Ahlmeyer, English, and Simons) found that, through polygraph examinations, the number offenders who “crossed over” age groups of victims is extremely high. The study revealed that before polygraph examinations, 6 percent of a sample of incarcerated sex offenders had both child and adult victims, compared to 71 percent after polygraph exams. Thus, caution must be taken in placing sex offenders in exclusive categories.) Marshall and Barbaree (1990) found in their review of studies that the recidivism rate for specific types of offenders varied:

Incest offenders ranged between 4 and 10 percent.

Rapists ranged between 7 and 35 percent.

Child molesters with female victims ranged between 10 and 29 percent.

Child molesters with male victims ranged between 13 and 40 percent.

Exhibitionists ranged between 41 and 71 percent.

How is that for scary statistics! And all these statistics are only for those crimes we find out about…from the CSOM site:

Underestimating Recidivism

Reliance on measures of recidivism as reflected through official criminal justice system data obviously omit offenses that are not cleared through an arrest or those that are never reported to the police. This distinction is critical in the measurement of recidivism of sex offenders. For a variety of reasons, sexual assault is a vastly underreported crime. The National Crime Victimization Surveys (Bureau of Justice Statistics) conducted in 1994, 1995, and 1998 indicate that only 32 percent (one out of three) of sexual assaults against persons 12 or older are reported to law enforcement. A three-year longitudinal study (Kilpatrick, Edmunds, and Seymour, 1992) of 4,008 adult women found that 84 percent of respondents who identified themselves as rape victims did not report the crime to authorities. (No current studies indicate the rate of reporting for child sexual assault, although it is generally assumed that these assaults are equally underreported.) Many victims are afraid to report sexual assault to the police. They may fear that reporting will lead to the following:

further victimization by the offender;

other forms of retribution by the offender or by the offender’s friends or family;

arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of an offender who may be a family member or friend and on whom the victim or others may depend;

others finding out about the sexual assault (including friends, family members, media, and the public);

not being believed; and

being traumatized by the criminal justice system response

Naturally, because God does indeed have a sense of humor, the Supremes just this very day have elected to shine the light of their unparalled wisdom down upon us small folks. Justice Kennedy, my fingers tremble with anger at being forced to type the honorific of Justice in front of this sad excuse for a human, in his infinite wisdom wrote this in todays opinion striking down Louisiana’s death penalty sentence against a scum who raped his 8 year oldÂ step daughter.

“Evolving standards of decency must embrace and express respect for the dignity of the person[.]”

Kennedy, the fingers won, you have no decency. You are an example of everything that is wrong and increasingly evil with this country. How dare him declare that a man who violently raped an 8 year old girl deserves respect and dignity. It is becoming more and more evident that our sides of the political spectrum cannot co-exist and that worries me tremendously. Macsmind is real happy too….

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers… Did Shakesphere have it right?

At the bottom of this post is a copy of a dumb ass email sent to me by the Republican Party. They miss me. I have given them hundreds of dollars…err perhaps a lot more in the last 31 years. I have worked the phones, knocked on doors, and written extensively on why they are better. I do none of that anymore…now those puddin heads want to send me stuffed animals named Sam to entice me to restart my giving…astounding. Why not send me some hope that they are different than the Democrats?

What happened? When did we lose focus? When did we go from being the Party of Ideas and philosophy to the party of appeasement and stuffed animals? You laugh and think he is nuts for saying the Republicans are the party of Appeasement? Tell me exactly what the hell is McCain calling for when he makes the claim that he will cross the aisle and work with the other side? The other side is Obama and tell me exactly when he has bragged about crossing the aisle to work with us? Why do we apologize for our ideas? Why don’t the Democrats apologize for theirs? Their ideas lead to corruption and disaster and yet we act as if they have ideas worth meeting halfway. Why? When do they meet us halfway and furthermore exactly why is it valuable to meet certain ideas halfway. Should we meet those who would nationalize our oil industries half way? What is the compromise point in that discussion? Should we give away half of our guns? Give away half of our children’s education to their corruptions? Goddamn I hate McCain…but I hate Obama worse.

Which ideas lead to corruption and disaster? Let me count the ways.

Democrat Ted Kennedy authored the 1965 Immigration that has led to whole sale changes of our society. He explicitly promised that his changes would not bring exactly what they have brought.

1965: “The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.” (uh dial one for english…2 for whatever)

In the fall of 1974, Nixon resigned under the pressure of the Watergate scandal and was succeeded by Gerald Ford. Congress cut funding to South Vietnam for the upcoming fiscal year from a proposed 1.26 billion to 700 million dollars (which led directly to the Boat People and Cambodia, congrats to the Democrats)

The War on Poverty…which has given us, drumroll please, more poverty.

I have to stop this is pissing me off…exactly HOW CAN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY BE SO CORRUPT AND LACKING OF IDEAS THAT WE ALLOW FOLKS WHO CAME UP WITH THIS CRAP TO WIN?

Thank you Democrats…and Thank you Republicans for being so unable to answer the idiocy of the Democrats that you are reduced to giving away GODDAMN STUFFED ANIMALS. If there is a God in heaven please let him send us someone who will rid us of the idiots currently in charge of the Republican party machine.

Dear Pierre,

Just in time to celebrate our Nation’s independence, meet Sam, the new member of the Republican National Committee.

Embroidered with the official logo of the RNC, Sam is decked out in red, white and blue and is sure to be the hit of your July Fourth party.

Sam is available for a limited-time only to our most loyal supporters like you, Pierre. We’ll send you Sam today with your special contribution of at least $35.

Or you can get all four Republican collectibles — Sam, Max, Maxine, and Patrick — with your special contribution of $110 by clicking here. The RNC elephants are wonderful plush toys and make a perfect gift for your favorite Republicans.

Your donation will be put to work immediately. The RNC is leading the way to ensure John McCain and all our Republican candidates have the resources needed to run strong campaigns and defeat the liberal Democrats this November.

Help elect Republicans from the courthouse to the White House and celebrate Independence Day in style with Sam. Click here to order now. Hurry and get Sam today while supplies last.

On behalf of Republican candidates at all levels, thank you for your continuing support of our Party this critical presidential election year.